Toshiki Okada <Metamorphosis of the Livingroom>

"These days I see many works that take ecological crises as the theme of the work. Often I find it problematic that these "themes" are once more "represented" on stage, in certain ways that either repeat the familiar criticisms of anthropocentric behavior or imitate an idealized relationship between humans and nature. These works risk the danger of consuming and wearing out this grave matter as materials that can be "used," which often results in making people tired of hearing about ecology or happy that their political correctness is confirmed. In that way, contrary to the ecological claims that are made on stage, the way the material is treated in these works is often highly extractivist and exploitative. They do not suggest us a different way of looking at and relating with this world. The form of the artwork conforms and repeats our gaze, our behavior, and our relations with the "outer" world that has led us to the present state.

For me, Metamorphosis of the Living Room was a form of art that practiced seeing an object, a space, and perhaps even the world in a different way. From what I perceived as an ordinary living room in the beginning, the space became porous--there were no longer walls dividing the inside and the outside--matters started intruding everywhere, and at one point, the space expanded so large that it seemed like the entire world, which was crumbling in pieces. There were only few visual cues, but they triggered the imagination so effectively that I started to perceive this living room expand into a universe. The world was indeed shattering in this piece, so perhaps it can be considered apocalyptic. But more importantly, the experience of observing the stage made me feel like I had strange goggles on that made me see the world already as extremely fragmented and porous, no longer filled with coherent and stable objects that we can control, nor our bodies as firm, safe, superior shells. The world was not crumbling, it was crumbled in the first place, humans had just visually organized it in ways that are safe and useful for humans. 

Rather than lamenting that our world is falling apart (which is no longer a new news), perhaps it is more helpful to see this world as porous as it actually is, beyond our self-sustained armor, beyond our visual perception. The music was ingenious in this sense, because it had such a strong presence, that you could literally feel these invisible sound particles "actually exist" and intrude into the space and through our bodies. The interaction between music and actors made it much more apparent, that invisible particles, materials intruding us is what is happening every second all around us, but we are just not aware of it. I found the overall intrusiveness of invisible presence in this work highly disturbing, threatening, but also highly fascinating, because it invites me to confront and maybe try to embrace such intrusion as part of my existence on this earth. Living in a time of pessimism and cynicism of what art can do, works like this give me a lot of strength and hope, because it is precisely using the "form" of theater to make something impossible become possible. Experimenting with fictions that create perceptions that will not be possible in real life."